The Soviet DP-27 light machine gun was not nearly the best machine gun of the Second World War. This weapon had many complaints and claims from the front-line soldiers. The worst of all was with its elements of ammunition - disks. The problems are such that the soldiers were almost ready to throw them away. However, all this does not so much negate the fact that the DP-27 became a weapon of Victory and carried on its bipod all the burden of the war on the eastern front. And yet, what was wrong with his disks?
In fact, it all started back in 1928, when the Degtyarev infantry machine gun was just being developed. At the time of the end of the Civil War, the Red Army ended up with many fire systems from different countries from different manufacturers. However, there was no machine gun of its own. Vasily Alekseevich Degtyarev was instructed to correct the lack of a light machine gun of his own production. The designer did a tremendous job and was able to create a weapon that took into account not only the specifics of the local theater of military operations, but also the specifics of the domestic industry.
One of the most important issues at the design stage of the machine gun was the choice of an element of ammunition. After much debate, it was decided to give preference all the same to the disk magazine, mounted on top. Including due to the fact that the Red Army already had a positive experience of using machine guns of the Lewis system with exactly the same ammunition system. A serious test for the USSR gunsmiths was the development of a new store for the domestic three-line cartridge 7.62x54 mm.
Although the machine gun turned out to be quite good in the end, its discs were a source of constant problems. They were too heavy, bent relatively easily, clogged with dirt, and the cartridges in them in some cases got confused and led to jamming of the weapon. All this required increased skill and competence from the machine gunner. In addition, each DP-27 was supposed to have 7 disks, which carried the second number in the calculation of a light machine gun. Another problem was that in a real combat situation, these disks were simply lost. During the Second World War, there were often those cases when only one or two disks remained for the DP-27, which seriously hampered its normal use in the future.
Numerous complaints from front-line soldiers made us think about creating a fundamentally new machine gun. However, in the end, all the trial novelties did not go into the series. The war ended earlier, and the military decided that it would be more rational not to create completely new weapons, but to rework the already existing DP-27, which, with all the specific complaints, had a lot of specific merits. This is how the history of Degtyarev's machine guns began.
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If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should definitely read about heroic PPS-43: half-forgotten Soviet assault rifle, which surpassed the PPSh.
A source: https://novate.ru/blogs/200521/59070/
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